The Dawn of a New Day
by Kanthia
Summary: Wandering in the Sacred Grove, looking for his way back home, Link runs into a very old friend. Spoilers; oneshot.


A year and three days bring Link back to the Sacred Grove, where the blue-green light throws strange shadows through the trees. Link wanders often through the grove, these days. Fishing and herding goats no longer satisfies him. He has been through heaven and hell, dragged his body through rain and snow, from the depths of the Goron Mines to the knife-cold stone of the City in the Sky where the Master Sword, in her sleepy, cold-butter voice, had whispered that she, too, had found her way home.

Link does not think he had ever come home, not when the carriage with the children pulled into Ordon, not when he knelt before Zelda and delivered her the sword, not even when she handed him a shard of the Mirror of Twilight, in return. These days when he can he wanders through the Sacred Grove, lost in the woods.

Surely this is a bigger thing than me, he thinks, as he looks up into the forest. Ganondorf had stood up, laughing, the Master Sword buried deep in his chest as he sowed Hyrule with white-blue blood. Link had thought that in that moment he might feel triumphant, or successful, or at least a little happy, but all he had felt then – staring down the Dark Lord, dying on his own two feet – was a little pathetic.

It never seems to rain in the Sacred Grove. Rain had never disturbed him, before; rain made the grass grow and the fish rise up from lake bottoms. The day he had laid siege on Hyrule Castle it had rained ceaselessly, soaked him straight through to his bones. Had he come to the Sacred Grove to escape that nightmare? Did the thick canopy of leaves shield the horror of the open sky, where the Ooccaa city and their wide, empty stares served as a reminder that all things good become horrible, in time? Or was he looking for the Skull Kid, who had served as both an enemy and a guide, a friend?

A disturbance in the trees catches his attention; he is grateful to be dragged out of his own thoughts. It is not the Skull Kid. It is a fairy, white-blue on blue-green.

Link is not used to seeing fairies outside of the usual pink, but he has grown weary of unusual things, and ignores it. The fairy flies over to him. It hovers before him, casting a glow on the forest floor.

"I've been looking for someone," it says, in a voice that is distinctly female. "Is that someone you?"

He wonders if he knows her. "Is it?"

"No, it is not." She pauses. Something in her voice sounds very, very old. "I'm looking for a man who calls himself the Hero's Shade. What are you looking for?"

"A –" He looks around. There is a Howling Stone near the entrance to the wood, but how could he explain those dreams to a stranger? Whatever she imagines him to be, the Hero's Shade is certainly no longer a man. " – A friend of mine. Or, at least, a home to go back to."

"Some of us get lost and can never go home," she says, her tone reflecting a sadness as old as time, for those whose home is destroyed, or decays, or changes beyond recognition; or for those who themselves change beyond recognition. "I hope we both find what we are looking for." She flits up into the treetops, and then she is gone.

Yes, Link finds himself thinking as he skulks back out of the woods, surely this was always a bigger thing than me. In the ruined graveyard hidden behind Hyrule Castle, that same cursed swordsman's grave had brought a reprieve from the rain. When Ganondorf died it had been twilight, the age of intersection when all things came together in one thread, and Link had been left with a lingering spirit of regret. He might have carried those regrets to his own grave. Midna would not have stood for such nonsense, but she had vanished into her own world – and perhaps Link will be able to return, one day, to his.

He emerges into the Faron Wood. Twilight has passed, and it is night, glorious night.

* * *

This was inspired by an anonymous ask to a friend of mine on tumblr: "What if Wii U Zelda was a Twilight Princess sequel where Twilight's looking for Midna in a parallel to Time looking for Navi and he finds Navi and Navi mistakes him for Time?"

What indeed. For some reason, it gave me the image of Twilight Princess Link running into Navi in the Sacred Grove, and the two of them failing to recognize each other.

_Whenever there is a meeting, a parting is sure to follow. However, that parting need not last forever..._


End file.
